Hi and hello good people,
I have a pretty weird but very serious question to pose: is there a way to determine when each renderer first implemented glossy reflections and / or refractions in their materials?
Many thanks to whomever has the knowledge and the kindness to point one in the right direction.
For mental ray, it was whenever they released the mia_material. Prior to that, I don’t believe they had a shader with any built-in glossy reflections/refractions. In 2004 for example (when I started learning Maya/mental ray), we still used the dielectric material chiefly. Glossies were among the main reasons to ditch the dielectric material for glasses at least.
I want to say the mia_material debuted in Maya 8.0 (so around 2006), but I could be mistaken.
I’m very curious, yes. I don’t know if I remember this correctly but didn’t mental ray support the standard maya shaders… and didn’t the maya shaders have control for glossiness? They also had their dielectric and other ‘brick’ shaders, that were more like examples of how people should’ve written their own, but even those - didn’t they have a glossy reflections control or smth?
The core of the question was: did one of these two renderers introduce glossy reflections before the other?
No, the base Maya shaders never had controls for glossy reflections/refractions. They had specularity controls, but it’s not the same thing.
My guess would be that mental ray had it first for Maya, but Vray was very young back then and it may have supported it internally.
mental ray is alas now dead for sure, but Vray is my rendering engine of choice when I can’t use MR.
mental ray had the DGS material prior to the MIA material. I don’t know exactly when it came out, but people were talking about in in 2003.
Literally, all it did was glossy reflection. It wasn’t a normal type of shader with tons of attributes
I remember those. My belief at that time was that those shaders were released just as examples of a starting block of how people should write their own shaders in production. Very few I think were using them, and later there was a large selection of custom shaders released - like Puppet’s shader. But anyway - at the time I was just a hobbyist.
But my main focus was to determine if Vray somewhat had glossy reflections before mental ray. I find it very unlikely but I do not have any concluding information.
Ahh yes, the DGS material had glossiness, but I assumed we were talking about variable glossiness such as the mia_material or Vray materials have, not simple specularity.
Yeah I don’t know the details, but I used them in production for a couple projects before MIA took over. Blinn shaders didn’t look as nice even with their blurry reflection MR attribute - maybe that was MR’s first glossy reflection shader?
I think the DGS shader rendered faster than blurry blinn. The DGS just had really limited options with what it would do, but if you needed a blurry reflection shader like for metal, it did the job.
Interesting. I’ve been messing around on my old SGI o2 and was amazed out how even Maya 1.0 software render had soft shadow capabilities. DoF was a post render pass.
BUT yes, Blurry reflections I don’t see. I have Softimage 3|D 3.9.x on it as well and I am not sure if you can load a blurry reflection shader.
I know Renderman had the blurry reflection capability pretty early as well even though it didn’t really have real raytracing unless you implemented BRMT.
Vray was made earlier than public release which I think was 2002.
Oh wait… here is a timeline.
http://vray10.chaosgroup.com/timeline
I’d wonder who did glossy blur first? Renderman, Vray, Mental Ray. I remember some Renderman Artist Tools docs showing how to get the blurry reflection. Not sure which version though… .it was before the Renderman for Maya product. Like… maybe Maya 3. or 4 time frame…